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Saturday, June 9, 2012

Re-Inventing My Twitter Presence

From time to time it's important to perform a make-over on aspects of your life. Anyway, that's my excuse. This month it's the turn of Twitter.

A few years ago I undertook an experiment to grow my Twitter following to 20,000 people. Time has since marched on and I am currently pushing the boundaries of 60,000 people. My life on Twitter has gone through 4 distinct phases:

Start-up - During this time I grew my follower base to about 20,000 people and tweeted about all and everything, only concerned with building a following

Brand-forming One - During this time I settled on tweeting only quotes and funny stories and interacted a lot with my followers. I grew my base to about 40,000

Author Re-brand One - In early 2011 I changed my Twitter name to also reflect my transition to becoming an author. I also changed my tweets to be more blog based and also interacted a lot with my followers. I grew my base to about 50,000

Author Re-brand Two - Late in 2011 I decided to go full out and over-tweet everything to help build my fan and author base. I automated a lot of my tweets and supplemented them with new blog posts and other interesting book review articles. I grew my base to what it is now (just below 60,000). Most of my tweeting is one-way and I only really get engaged with followers that @message me

And so it's time to move forward again. I have missed the interactions I have had with followers but, you know, it's damn difficult to keep fully engaged with 60,000 followers! This week I changed my Twitter name to only reflect my author name, Paul Dorset, and I also updated my profile description to better reflect what I want to convey. Finally, during the next few days I am going to change the way I interact with people on Twitter too. It's time to spend more time engaging with people and generally post more personal messages. The blog post links I have been swamping my timeline with are also going to be scaled back. Will this make a difference to anything? I don't know - it's just another part of my continued Twitter (and social media) experiment. We live in ever-changing times and if we don't adapt, we die. So, here's to the next 10,000 or 20,000 Twitter followers - or not. Let's see where the journey takes me.